Sunday, October 27, 2013

Well I finished Davy, and so here he is. Wasn't happy with Maya renders, so I tried it through Marmoset Toolbag. Guess this is equivalent to a realtime game render? Anyways I also learned what the heck an emissive map was, which wasn't too hard to get to work. So yeah here's my stab at the SC2, Gears, Halo armors with a bit of my last sci-fi soldier all mixed together. I believe 5992 polys ends up being about 11k tris, if that's more your thing. Almost the same as the Berserker from Gears of War 1 I have sitting on my external hard drive. So, I think I did alright hopefully, my professor say it isn't low enough. So I'm gonna try harder with my next character for portfolio. First time I've managed to get a real character all on one UV page before as well, and at 2048. I'm really happy with how this turned out. Now to get crackin on the next one, only 6 weeks left for me... no pressure lol.

Sunday, October 13, 2013

Well I had started another space soldier character in zBrush about a week and a half ago. It's not done yet, but I was working at school on it Friday and zBrush or the computer wouldn't let me get very far without crashing every few minutes for whatever reason. So to blow off my frustration I decided to sketch him out instead. I needed to fine tune the final look of his boots, gauntlets, and gloves anyways. Funny how none of that came to fruition when I got as far as I did with this. I'd like to work more on it, and I might in the future. It seems decent enough to stick in the back of my portfolio or website somewhere when I get those ready. Not really sure about the pose, it was just how the original sketch ended up, and I wasn't really thinking about it when I started. Also his name is Davy, one of my friends decided that was what he should be called, and from that point on it was so.

I even managed to work on this in a way that kind of looks like a tutorial, so I figured it couldn't hurt to upload that. So here's the process behind Davy:

1 - Rough Sketch

2 - Block-In Lights and Shadows

Did this in a new layer under the sketch.

3 - Refining

The longest part. Just defining each part better, adding finer details

4 - Atmosphere

Rendered out some easy clouds with Photoshop and stuck 'em over Davy. Erased the area over his arm to make atmospheric perspective more apparent. Easy to remember as well, darker = closer and further away = lighter (actually by lighter I mean closer to the background color ex. the sky)

5 - Fancy Lights

This is just me trying to get more bang out of this, I already had highlights but I felt like he needed some more. Just went around with the soft brush and painted in the lights. Then went back with the brush at around 10% opacity and built up the glowing aura around each light. It was the same process for the highlights I intensified on his visor and shoulder.

Friday, October 11, 2013

Well since our group finally put up a website for our short, I felt obliged to post a few of the worthwhile things I did for it here. The soldier pictured here though was the final version I wanted for the short, which addressed some issues with animation of her arms. Time however was not on our side so it got left by the wayside. Below that is her gun, and if you notice there's a R+H on the side view. We decided to stick that there after the events that befell Rhythm and Hues. Finally there's the creature of the short, whom we affectionately called Coco. Fun fact, from hi-poly to low-poly (Ha, not really) to textures and rigging, Coco was completed in basically a day. Our previous creature had become a horrible nightmare that was unusable, so I jumped at the chance to save the creature. In the end it worked out for the better, Coco was much much more menacing than what we had before.